Rosalia: an experimental research site to study hydrological processes in a forest catchment

Experimental watersheds have a long tradition as research sites in hydrology and have been used since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU) recently extended its experimental research forest site “Rosalia” with an area of 950 ha towards the creation of a full ecological-hydrological experimental watershed. The overall objective is to implement a multi-scale, multi-disciplinary observation system that facilitates the study of water, energy and solute transport processes in the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. This article describes the characteristics of the site and the monitoring network and its instrumentation that has been installed since 2015, as well as the datasets. The network includes four discharge gauging stations and seven rain gauges along with observations of air and water temperature, relative humidity, and electrical conductivity. In four profiles, soil water content and temperature are recorded at different depths. In addition, since 2018, nitrate, TOC and turbidity have been monitored at one gauging station. In 2019, a programme to collect isotopic data in precipitation and discharge was initiated. All data collected since 2015, including, in total, 56 high-resolution time series (with 10 min sampling intervals), are provided to the scientific community on a publicly accessible repository. The datasets are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3997140 (Fürst et al., 2020).

L32: Global change impacts, such as climate warming? I don't see how climate itself is a global change impact. L33-35: Although I somewhat agree, who realized this? reference needed L35: experimental catchments? remove sites L45: unclear which framework is referred to L57-65: why is the LTER not introduced together with the other networks? L74: if the object "was and still is" the word "is" is sufficient to indicate that L76: if this is "a research emphasis" what are other important points?
L79-80: please rephrase this sentence to provide more clarity.
L83: how does the set-up allow for these experiments, in comparison to other sites? L89: "are and will be investigated by a team of researchers" this sounds as if the team is already chosen, and cannot be adapted anymore. This is contrary to what I would expect is the aim of publishing this article, which is to promote other researchers to also use the data that is being published in this publication.
L89: same comment as with "was and still is" in L77 L95-98: since this is such a standard article lay-out, I would suggest that the others consider removing this description. L148: please specify what the "DMBS addVANTAGE Pro' is directly when first mentioning it.
L154: can the authors be more specific about the treatment samples after being collected by the totalisers or as grab samples? How are these samples stored in the samplers to ensure that the chemistry and isotope samples can both be analyzed adequately?
157: The field courses are organized by students? Or should this be "by students during field courses" L158: which other (LiDAR-based) DEMS are available? and, LiDAR is commonly spelled with a lower-case 'i'. L161: what is a "hydrological" site? A site at which hydrological measurements are being performed? in this case, the word 'hydrological' is redundant, given the sentence that follows.
L163: new line started where not needed.
L168: please use the metric system. L178: Reference missing for the "Thompson" weir.
C4 L181: is their SDI-12 interface really important to mention in this article? And if so, be specific as to why the SDI-12 interface is preferred. L193: please rewrite to clarify the meaning of the sentence. Also, please quantify and be specific about how the rain measurements are affected, and why they are reliable in this data publication.
L212: d18O and d2H are already defined earlier in the manuscript. Please use the short-hand notation to make the text more concise, or refrain from defining the shorthand notations.. L314: what are the assumptions to this two end-member mixing model, and are these assumptions valid in the Rosalia catchment? What is the influence of soil water during rainfall events, and what is the EC signature of soil water vs. groundwater? Section 5.1: please be more specific and actually quantify the results of your baseflow separation (don't forget to include uncertainties). L320: please provide a reference for end-member splitting analysis.
L343: please give a measure of how well they match, NSE for instance.
L348: please be more specific about the data cleaning process. This is a very important part of the data collection and publication process, and is not mentioned at all in the manuscript.   C6 Figure 10: "stream water" or "river water" isotopes rather than river isotopes. Figure 11: in its current form, Figure 11 does not add much to the article. The precipitation and discharge timeseries have already been shown in previous figures, and the results of the end-member mixing analyses are not shown. Figure 12: is this specific discharge or absolute discharge?